With a passion for Ohio and a drive to share with others what he loves about working and living in the State of Ohio, Mike McDermott, Lead Community Manager with Bash Foo Social Media is now a card-carrying Ohio Ambassador.

Mr. McDermott will work to help excite his friends, family and business associates about all that Ohio has to offer. The Ohio Ambassador program seeks to gain recognition as the ideal state to achieve a perfect balance in life, allowing for both professional and personal success without sacrificing one for the other.

As an Ambassador for the State of Ohio, Mr. McDermott seeks to:

• Share his Ohio experiences
• Address misperceptions of Ohio
• Avoid negatively positioning another state or location
• Be supportive of all Ohio business

Mr. McDermott seeks to achieve these goals as the founder of the Why Buy Ohio alliance http://whybuyohio.com where he works to encourage the growth and opportunities made for small, independent businesses in the State of Ohio.

About Bash Foo Social Media

Bash Foo Social Media is a business strategy and marketing firm that grows online communities of followers as well as brand relevance. Bash Foo Social Media seeks to become the most valued and trusted partner for every client through a passionate voice, winning strategies and measurable results. Today,
Bash Foo Social Media delivers these winning strategies and measurable results for companies across all industries in Ohio as well as a number of national and international accounts. For more information on Bash Foo Social Media, call 937-573-8535 or visit http://bashfoo.com

Bash Foo Social Media constructs strong business strategies.

Our uncompromising and unconventional analysis of a clients business needs maximizes the returns of even a small social media campaign through the gratuitous use of “Foo”.

Foo (foo) -verb

The amazing ability of human action in all of its forms to excite, engage, enrage, amuse, disgust, align and create a passionate response in others.

Foo is the action taken every day by our strategists to build viral blog articles, build and then engage fans, earn and then maintain community influence and finally to stand at the top of the highest mountain and announce brand dominance to the market.

If you are looking for Foo, you came to the right place.

Overachieving SM specialist and community manager looking to meet and learn new techniques from the digital marketing superheroes of today in order to lead hundreds of small and medium sized businesses to build strong communities rallying around their brand. Recently experienced a string of family, economic and employment challenges which prohibit me from flying to SoCal to meet with these guys in person.

The Social Media Success Summit is right down my alley. I can sit in the comfort of my SM castle here in Tipp City, Ohio and experience the Session Objectives!

• How to Create a Mega-Following and Mega-Sales With Social Media Marketing
• Building a Loyal Facebook Following for Increased Profits
• How to Grow and Engage an Audience on Twitter
• Using the Power and Reach of LinkedIn to Grow Your Business
• How to Productively Engage in Social Media Marketing
• Five Reasons You Need to Be on Twitter (and Tools to Help You Manage)
• Social Media Start Up: 3 Key Tools to Build Your Social Media Marketing Plan
• How to Attract Tens of Thousands of People in Mere Days
• Using Social Bookmarking for Improved Traffic, Links and Visibility

The SM superheroes that I referred to are:

• Chris Garrett
• Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV)
• Darren Rowse (Problogger)
• Mari Smith (Facebook guru)
• Jason Alba (wrote the book on LinkedIn)
• Ann Handley (MarketingProfs)
• Brian Clark (Copyblogger)
• Denise Wakeman (BlogSquad).

So yea, I want to with the free ticket to the conference and capitalize on the info-sharing and bash foo goodness from this online SMM summit.

What an exciting time! Social Media is going to rule the roost according to Forrester research released today. I am very glad to be working on the bleeding edge of this new vista.

If you are a business looking for guidance or assistance in setting up a social media presence, please contact me!

Michael McDermott
Community Manager
Bash Foo Social Media

Social Media Today is a moderated social community that allows you to start building a personal network with your peers, create a profile and promote your business, add content by blogging directly on the site or adding the RSS feed of your current blog, comment and rate posts and have instant access to some of the best minds on issues that concern SM specialists directly.

Bash Foo Social Media has joined Social Media Today in a continued effort to provide the highest level of critical review and consideration of Online Reputation Management solutions.

My second thought for today is in great respect for Community Strategist, Connie Bensen. Up to this point I was busily scurrying amongst several dozen highly rated blogs on Community Leadership and Strategy. One blog may cover SEO tactics, another may focus on Web 2.0 consulting, and a third may deal with the pitfalls and challenges Social Media specialists may encounter. Connie has done a very nice job of consolidating ideas and providing tons of original content on the subject. Kudos Connie! You join the few and the proud members of my Blogroll.

This evening I went out and visited the Social Media Club site. It contains lots of material for beginners as  well as experienced s.m. consultants. I wanted to share that Bash Foo has joined SMC as a member. I’ll be sporting their logo and giving them the all important “nofollow” backtrack.
I am fairly certain that they have no idea what Foo is and why it is important to them.

From a commercial sense, advertisers look to drive customers to their content through a few standard vehicles:

1. Stating and Proving that their product is superior to others
2. Pricing their product competitively
3. Promotion and Publicity for their product (radio, internet banners, TV commercials)

Marketing folks have lived with the fact that while their customers may appreciate their product, very few make a purchase decision because of Branding, rather they purchase due to other factors like price, appearance and social factors “my best friend has one!”.
A very personal example of this is my wife’s affinity for Vera Bradley bags. Empirically, the bags are made of inexpensive quilted cloth, are radically colored and patterned and lack today’s “handy places” for cellphones. My wife refers to her bag as her “Vera Bradley” and she always points out other women with their bags, comparing hers to theirs.

Her love for Vera Bradley bags extends well beyond the ability of marketers to promote their product. The key buying decision is being made due to the social repercussions of not participating in life with a “Vera Bradley” slung on one’s shoulder. Essentially the core marketing effort was performed through the creation of a social network of acceptance and reverence for a Brand. Participating with that Brand brought self-satisfaction and envy, non-participation with the Brand brought lowered expectations and social ostracism.

Social Media has a similar capability to drive people around common ideas/beliefs and products. A key additive effect is the uniformity to which Internet participants can and do judge products. With a few keyboard clicks, a customer can find out if a product is a scam or not, how highly it is rated in independent studies and which products are the “top” ones in their segment. Additionally they can introduce other product considerations like “is it eco-friendly?” or “Is it Made in the USA?”

Now, what if Social Media was able to “corral” users with specifically indicated preferences from specifically indicated socio-economic profiles and drive them around products that met and exceeded their expectations? This would greatly reduce the carpet bombing of traditional marketing allowing a marketing team to communicate to self-elected individuals who can already understand and appreciate their products.

Here at Bash-foo, it is becoming more and more apparent that Social Media can pull together groupings of individuals who can be willingly targeted for product marketing campaigns. Instead of being Spammed with products you don’t appreciate, just imagine having product news, updates and coupons coming your way in the same fashion an RSS feed does. You sign up, you get the goods.

What are your thoughts? Do you have a product that needs a gaggle of self-identified, interested customers who can and will buy your product?? Or, are you just a consumer who wants to “shape” the product offerings you view so that you have more time to focus on other things in life like family, entertainment, long walks on the beach??

I am interested in your comments, and hope to share more Foo with you soon!

Either by API call, the rendering of a messaging service (such as XMPP) or even the use of asynchronous email these service providers such as Facebook/LinkedIn, and this WordPress blog all rely on the system independence of each other, as well as the loose coupling of the integration modules that bind them.

So, this is to inform my LinkedIn followers that you will begin to see feeds from my personal blog entitled Bash Foo for the Soul at http://bashfoo.com. I’ll only be throwing over self-authored professional material to LinkedIn while continuing to share my brief rants, even briefer Tweets, and multimedia extravaganzas with my supportive “Foo” audience.